Over the past year and a half I’ve learned a lot of tricks. It’s safe to say if I had to start all over again, Interesting NPCs would look nothing like it does now. While I don’t know if that’s a good thing, a bad thing, or no thing at all, what I do know is that with Dragonborn, I essentially have a clean slate and plenty of toys.

With version 3 released, and version 3.01 cleaning up the last of the bugs, I decided to dust off my old follower Alphena Dren and tinker around a bit. I wanted to design her in a way that allows her to interact with everyone in town, and even partake in quest conversations, especially since so many of the vanilla player choices are limited to a single response. So instead of mindlessly clicking on a sentence, why not let Alphena ask those questions? The following is a concept video of how this would work.

In the first scene, Milore and Alphena chat for a bit while the player stands off to the side and picks his nose.  In scene two, we have a quest starting conversation with Glover Mallory that turns into a three-way conversation instead.

It doesn’t have to be limited to a single person either. Using the same techniques I use for the bards, I can take any NPCs in the room and make them have a conversation with Alphena. The one caveat is I have to play Dragonborn first, and frankly I don’t know if I’ll ever find the time.

This is Acidrica bringing the Orc Duraz to life. Duraz is one of the original 10 or so characters in the mod, and the last of 200 or so to be unvoiced. Hopefully. I mean, I don’t want to jinx things here, as we’re still not even halfway through the recording stages for this one.

The fact that she’s still unrecorded tells you something. It should also tell you why there aren’t many female Orcs in the mod. Which is why Acidrica is a special snowflake, and I thank Malacath every night that she exists. She is awesome.